From Joe Gregorio's site...

Amazon has opened SimpleDB for beta testers. As you would expect the system is designed to scale and as such has dropped generic relational operations such as joins and transactions. What we're looking at here is another instantiation of megadata.

And before you start beating your chest and exclaiming how "real" applications need joins and transactions please read "The End of an Architectural Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite)" (pdf).

His post is very short but that is where I first saw the news so I wanted to pass on the link love.  For a more descriptive post (that isn't the stock Amazon site) you can look over on O'Reilly's site. 

Normally I like to give the posts on this blog a little more thought than I've given this one (I just read the news a couple minutes ago) but this was so interesting to me that I had to post.  I really think Amazon is on to something here. 

This service seems to be built around (a) emulating a SQL environment and (b) providing an extremely scalable solution for start ups.  If it delivers on its performance promise this could very well convince people to stop using mySQL altogether.  If that happens it could very well rule the startup market making today a big day in the technology world.

Amazon's web service strategy has been questioned by investors since day one but just think of the money at play if they could become the de facto data provider for most of the major start ups in the world.

That kind of business would likely dwarf even their retail operations in revenue.

Addendum: Here's another interesting link.